Former Manor team principal John Booth says he was not surprised to see Formula One rookies Haas enjoy such a strong debut in the sport given its strong technical partnership with Ferrari.<\/p>\n
Romain Grosjean made the most of a wild Australian Grand Prix to finish sixth in Melbourne and give the US team their first points right off the bat. Haas was the first team to enter F1 since HRT, Lotus Racing (then Caterham), and Virgin Racing (later Marussia, Manor) joined the fray in 2010.<\/p>\n
Now overseeing Manor\u2019s World Endurance Championship programme in LMP2, Booth explains that Haas\u2019 close association with Maranello has put the American outfit in a much stronger position than any team in the aforementioned trio.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously in Formula One performance is linked to the budget available,\u201d he told Motorsport.com<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cThey did a great job, don\u2019t get me wrong, but they also clearly have a very healthy budget and went about things in a way that made the debut easier for them.<\/p>\n \u201cWith the close link with Ferrari for two years before they made their debut, I think it was very obvious where they were going to be.<\/p>\n \u201cThe biggest surprise is where they qualified [19th<\/sup> and 20th<\/sup>]. That was the biggest surprise to me.\u201d<\/p>\n After only one race, Haas has already scored more points than what HRT, Caterham, and Manor combined for, with Jules Bianchi\u2019s superb drive to ninth at the 2014 Monaco Grand Prix the only top 10 appearance of the three minnows.<\/p>\n Booth says the situation was \u201ctotally different\u201d in 2010 as the odds were already stacked against that year\u2019s newcomers.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we entered Formula One, we were told by [ex-FIA president] Max [Mosley] that we could run on 30 million dollars and it didn\u2019t quite work out that way.\u201d<\/p>\n FEATURE: A long wait – France’s 20-year\u00a0win drought in F1<\/p>\n Technical analysis – Melbourne<\/p>\n Keep up to date with all the F1 news via\u00a0Facebook\u00a0and\u00a0Twitter<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Former Manor team principal John Booth says he was not surprised to see Formula One rookies Haas enjoy such a strong debut in the sport given its strong technical partnership with Ferrari. Romain Grosjean made the most of a wild Australian Grand Prix to finish sixth in Melbourne and give the US team their first…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2649\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}